Watch, listen, repeat. Simon plays a sequence of lights and tones on four coloured lenses and dares you to copy it, one step longer every round.
It was invented by Ralph Baer, father of the home video game console, working freelance with Howard Morrison of Chicago toy designers Marvin Glass & Associates. Milton Bradley named it after Simon Says and gave it a round case. This unit is marked “Made in U.S.A.”.
Interesting facts
The father of the video game. Born in Germany in 1922, Baer fled the Nazis with his family in 1938. At Sanders Associates his “Brown Box” became the Magnavox Odyssey of 1972, the first home video game console. He earned over 150 patents and the National Medal of Technology.
Midnight at Studio 54. Baer saw Atari’s arcade game Touch Me in 1976 and judged it “nice gameplay, terrible execution”. He chose Simon’s four tones after reading that a bugle plays only four notes. It launched in May 1978 at a midnight party at New York’s Studio 54.
More flashing brains. Simon was the start of a run. Baer and Morrison followed it with the eight-button Super Simon for Milton Bradley in 1979, and Baer designed Maniac for Ideal the same year. Computer Perfection and Amaze-A-Tron also appear among his electronic games.